listing updated packages only

[Gary L. Greene, Jr.]

On Monday 13 November 2006 04:24, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Sat, 11 Nov 2006, Gary L. Greene, Jr. wrote:
> > Going through past conversations on the list....
>
> Been a tad quiet around here, huh :)
>
> > I think with regard to a update-checker run via cron, stand-alone GUI
> > tools, or some tray applet in KDE/GNOME, a plain output of package names
> > would work in the beginning. What I'd LOVE to see is the RPM change-log
> > or some such be packed into the apt cached DB. Then we could have the lua
> > script do the list with the following format:
> >
> > [PACKAGE_NAME]\t[STRING_CONTAINING_MOST_RECENT_CHANGE_LOG_ENTRY]\n
> >
> > Then it can be parsed by external tools, like the script that Vincent was
> > working with or the package install tools I and Logan are working on.
>
> Enabling access to package changelogs is a longstanding thing on my
> todo-list (hmm, seems to missing from the roadmap, added now...)
>
> Technically, getting the changelogs out of rpmlib is easy. From there on
> it gets nastier.
> - Old style apt repositories dont carry changelog data at all, so to
> access the changelog the whole package would need to be downloaded.

IMO, if the changelog data isn't there, just ignore that field in the DB. It 
means that you'd have to query for if the field exists in the DB table. If it 
doesn't, return null string and move on. This will mean that those of us 
writing front-ends will just have to deal with it.

> - Repomd puts changelogs into the "other.xml.gz" file, which tends to be
> huge and needs to be downloaded fully to access any packages changelog. As
> apt can't do "download on demand" of the repository data the huge file
> would need to be downloaded every time you do 'update', whether you need
> the data or not.
> - Speficying which instance of package data you want (eg one from rpmdb vs
> one from a repository) is needlessly hard in apt itself, impossible (IIRC)
> with current Lua interface. So the changelog data ends up being "so near
> yet so far away"
>
> Another related thing is that it's now possible to inject arbitrary
> additional metadata into repomd. Starting with FC6, this is used by
> yum/pirut/yum-updatesd to show "update information" which is separate from
> the actual changelogs. I certainly want to support this as well, somehow.

THIS is a cool idea, that I'd like to see in regular APT repos too as this 
would allow front ends to bring up special update dialogs, etc.

> So, essentially the thing is: accessing the changelog data is ridiculously
> hard at the moment, largely due to apt's structure. Various roadblocks
> need to be removed to make it sane first - but this certainly is pretty
> high on my most-wanted things.
>
>  	- Panu -
>
>
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-- 
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
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